I am curious how truly different Silicon Valley is versus other areas. While we give lip service to the idea of failure being OK, the reality is in most places it is destructive to your long term prospects.
I am from the midwest and around here there is a very cliquey mindset. Hang in and around the startup communities and you will see the people who claim to be investors, the people who actually are investors, the people who claim to be founders/entreprenuers and the people actually doing something. Then there are the posers, always around trying to be part of the game and gossiping about every founder, judging every idea and trying to generally be seen as part of the in-crowd. It is like high school only with serious money involved. I point all this out to say that this clique mindset gives lip service to the idea of failure or pivots being OK but in reality - you just blew it. You didn't have what it takes. You are really no good. Your idea sucked. etc etc etc.
What is worse is that breaking into the funding market is rather difficult unless you have a success story under your belt. Started a company and exited (even if a meager acquihire) then you get an instant seat at the table. On the flip side, if you failed - that failure acts as a noose going forward.
Like I said, I am really curious if SV is truly different or people like to think it is different and market it as different when in reality it is the same high school clique show that I see around here.
There are posers of course, and people with other issues, but in general I've found folks to be pretty honest. What a lot of people miss though is that it takes time.
There is definitely an inverse power log sort of thing where the number of people who have gone right from college into startup success is really small, and the number of people who have gone from school to startup success in 10 years is pretty large.
A typical trajectory seems to be move here working for some current 'big' tech company. Build a network of the cool people there and figure out where you eventually want to live, then show your stuff at BigCorp while people who have been there longer start peeling off. Most people know who are the 'good' people and who are the not so good people at their previous employment, if they have you in the 'good' category and they've gone off to do a startup you find interesting, you can often follow them there. Then get your feet wet in a startup early employee to exit (death, buyout, what haveyou). During that time you get known by the VCs in the company and your peers there, perhaps you recruit people. You prove you can be effective in a small environment. Then using your connections with investors or other people you've met you go in as a really early group of already more seasoned people, which ideally has a solid outcome, and at that point 10 - 12 years have your graduation from school you are ready to start your own thing. The graphs in this chart [1] match my experience. People doing a lot of the founding are in their 30's.
Up until you're the founder though, success or failure is rarely on you, its on the founders. And even then depending on how it failed well that can actually be a positive if it was shooting for the stars and only making it to the outskirts of the solar system.
Background: I grew up in the midwest, lived in London, and now live in SV.
Here's my 2c. The average person in SV is on their 4-5th startup (whether started or early employee), as compared to the 1st-3rd elsewhere (YMMV). Think of it this way - instead of BigCo wasting away money on a new product launch (good example - Microsoft Kin), there's loads of money being poured into 100's of Kin-like products, and only very few emerge victorious. This is only possible because of the massive amount of recycled money in tech startups.
The rationalization of failure in SV has less to do with commercial progress and more about sociological factors. In other words, there is a huge support network of people who have experienced failures, so it eases the pain of it happening to you. Think about going to an AA meeting where there are 100 recovering alcoholics vs one that has 5. The one with the 100 makes it much easier to recover. You get a large pool of like-minded people and can create allegiances/relationships with much more variety. Want to find someone who also failed a Fitness Tech wearable company in Chicago? Good luck. In SV? There's probably one living down the street from you.
Lastly, there is a fair share of fakers here. Number wise, more than anywhere else, but relative to the successes, it's no different than anywhere else. People can hustle their way into the industry with little effort. People rarely check backgrounds here, and there is a winner take all attitude (integrated with a passive, pay-it-forward mentality).
> What is worse is that breaking into the funding market is rather difficult unless you have a success story under your belt.
This is slightly a myth. One thing that is preached here and does bode well, is that traction matters. If you can build something (that people want), get traction (prove they want it), then there is more than enough money floating around to get funding. Is it easier to get funding once you've proven yourself in the Valley? Absolutely. But you'd be surprised to find that funding isn't everything here.
The reason failure is OK is because there are a variety of factors outside of your control, and your ability to succeed may or may not depend on that variable. Whether it did, you'll most likely never know.
The possibility of failure based extraneous conditions already makes failure OK.
My internet marketing business failed because Google changed their SEO guidelines and it shut me down. I did everything perfectly, or so I thought, and then it just happened. That's alright.
I think failure should be taken in context. Recently in a big project at a bank (absolute disaster of a project, most of us quit), I am seen as a failure because I do not spend my time after hours (unpaid) working, while the rest of my team does. Is this in my control? Yeah sure it is, but at the same time it isn't.
> On the flip side, if you failed - that failure acts as a noose going forward.
A personal fail is a form of personal victory, seen as failure by everyone else who isn't you.
Thinking out loud here...I'm sure this will get downvoted. I've never met PG or Sam - this comes only from videos I've watched online - but it seems not only the way they speak, but their mannerisms as well, are eerily similar. I doubt this is because Sam is mimicking PG or vice versa. Some of it I'm sure is due to the fact that in many videos they're just giving the standard pitch about YC's mission which is bound to sound similar.
I don't quite know what to make of it. I can hear my Organizational Behavior professor from college yelling "Group think! Group think!" or some bs like that but I was never a huge fan of that stuff. It certainly doesn't stand out as much as people who have picked up Zuck's habits. Ever hear anyone begin the answer to any question (literally does not matter what the question is or how it is posed) with "Right, so...". You can be sure their youtube history is riddled with Zuck interviews.
I know it's not isolated to tech and every industry faces this phenomenon. It just makes me cringe and I wish it wasn't so prevalent.
From my experience people tend to parrot the mannerisms of people that they emulate and vice versa. Or maybe spend much time around. No time to find support for this but I'm sure there are numerous studies that say the same.
Paul has a great deal of repect for Sam and Sam for Paul.
Not to mention that people are probably going to be more likely to support people that are like them in one way or another. I know when I get a phone call I tend to like people who talk fast, don't mess around with niceties (to me "how are you doing" is a complete waste of time) and get right to the point. Others of course don't. [1]
That said I don't know if your point is correct or not but it wouldn't surprise me if it was.
Starting a sentence with "so" is a crutch that I started to notice people using several years ago. That's clearly something that they pick up when surrounded in a community of others doing the same.
[1] A bit of selling is always like modem negotiation. Usually it's a good idea to parrot the behavior of the person you are trying to sell to. If they talk slow you talk slow. If they talk fast you talk fast. In general of course always exceptions.
Public speaking is a learned skill and to do it well, you need to do a few things that you wouldn't necessarily do in face to face conversation. I don't think it's the greatest way to judge what someone is like because a lot of nuance has to be cut from the content and your personality to appeal to a larger audience.
From the short conversations and limited interactions I've had with each of them plus Sam's actions since becoming president (eg http://blog.samaltman.com/what-ive-learned-from-female-found... and his recent RFS for breakthrough technologies) it seems to me that their leadership styles are very, very different.
If YC's goal is to find the next Dropbox it makes sense that they fund ~3% of applicants. If their goal is to get more people starting startups it makes no sense. So this seems like a case where we should look at what they do, not what they say.
Yeah, that confused me. Sam says he wants to help more people who wouldn't usually start startups, start startups, and he says that YC is the best way to do that. I very much doubt that people who aren't determined to start a startup would get into YC (he says so himself when he states that YC looks for determined founders).
I look at the alumni companies and I get the feeling the YC never needed a unicorn. There are lots of interesting companies in there that will generate plenty of cash operationally, not necessarily via exit.
"One of the surprises for me, personally - I would have said a while ago that I thought intelligence was the most important characteristic of founders, but I'm now sure that that's wrong, and that determination is the most important thing."
"I now have enough experience with startups to be able to say what the most important quality is in a startup founder, and it's not what you might think. The most important quality in a startup founder is determination. Not intelligence-- determination"
The comments on the CNN Money page almost universally negative, and almost all based on misunderstandings or sheer ignorance. I wonder how much longer the tech industry can ignore the inevitable backlash from growing inequality in this country.
Well, the arguments in the thread so far aside, I thought the reminder that being determined was important.
When you're sitting around in a room at 3AM in the morning in front of the glow of a monitor slaving away on code with no paycheck in sight, random inspirational tidbits on the internet make a difference -- particularly from people on the side of success. Even with funding, sometimes those 3AM silent moments can be scary.
> "How do we convince that brilliant engineer that has the idea he's really passionate about, that can change the world, to start a startup and not go work as an engineer at a big company?"
I like the thought behind it, but it seems a liiiitle bit ingenuous to say it like that because success usually constitutes being acquired later on by the supposed "big company" and VC's making a lot of money.
Right. I wonder if Silicon Valley types will ever be able to move away from the faux-altruistic mindset and just acknowledge that they are interested in making more money than a single person could ever comfortably spend in 10 lifetimes. And that's not a bad thing! And maybe the world becomes a slightly better place in the process, but there's just such a disconnect right now between what they say and what they end up doing.
Not only that, for many engineers they are actually going to be "changing the world" at a larger company with huge resources and scale to give them. It's just a different mindset, not better or worse. I wish we weren't so judgmental either way.
I don't normally comment on grammar issues, but I just can't get your use of the word "ingenuous" out of my head.
My first thought was that you meant disingenuous. And that makes sense in the context of your sentence.
But then I checked if ingenuous is even a word... and it is: "showing innocent or childlike simplicity and candidness" or " lacking craft or subtlety". And those sort of work in the context of the sentence too.
So either it was a typo, a misunderstanding of english word formation, a brain fart, or an intentional use of an uncommon word by someone far more articulate than I.
If you are subtly pointing fingers, please point at "big company" and not the VC. They are the ones offering that engineer X today and 100X in the case of an acquisition.
To be fair to big companies, it is quite possible for the brilliant engineer with an idea that he's passionate about, to change the world while working for a big company. Obvious examples that come to mind - Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat.
I’m very interested to see how the mainstream press covers something I understand well. Gives me a input → output pair to train my model of the press’s lens on the world. It’s also interesting to see how the public reacts to such a thing.
"How do we convince that brilliant engineer that has the idea he's really passionate about, that can change the world, to start a startup and not go work as an engineer at a big company?"
Silicon Valley's engineer fetish is inane. Most early-stage web startups simply need CRUD applications that work at limited scale. Commodity-level web developers can build these applications.
What is not a commodity, in order of importance:
1. Domain expertise.
2. Product development/management.
3. User experience.
I'm sure lots of people would disagree, but you can test this. Go out and try to find the following:
1. Somebody who has worked in an industry for more than 5 years, knows it inside and out, and has relationships that can be leveraged for sales and business development.
2. An experienced product manager.
3. A proven UI/UX person capable of designing quality experiences around moderately complex workflows.
4. A PHP or Rails developer who can build a working application if given a reasonable spec and design assets.
#4 is not your problem. Most of the time, this person will be the easiest to locate and cheapest to acquire.
[+] [-] keithwarren|12 years ago|reply
I am curious how truly different Silicon Valley is versus other areas. While we give lip service to the idea of failure being OK, the reality is in most places it is destructive to your long term prospects.
I am from the midwest and around here there is a very cliquey mindset. Hang in and around the startup communities and you will see the people who claim to be investors, the people who actually are investors, the people who claim to be founders/entreprenuers and the people actually doing something. Then there are the posers, always around trying to be part of the game and gossiping about every founder, judging every idea and trying to generally be seen as part of the in-crowd. It is like high school only with serious money involved. I point all this out to say that this clique mindset gives lip service to the idea of failure or pivots being OK but in reality - you just blew it. You didn't have what it takes. You are really no good. Your idea sucked. etc etc etc.
What is worse is that breaking into the funding market is rather difficult unless you have a success story under your belt. Started a company and exited (even if a meager acquihire) then you get an instant seat at the table. On the flip side, if you failed - that failure acts as a noose going forward.
Like I said, I am really curious if SV is truly different or people like to think it is different and market it as different when in reality it is the same high school clique show that I see around here.
I hope it is different, I truly do.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|12 years ago|reply
There is definitely an inverse power log sort of thing where the number of people who have gone right from college into startup success is really small, and the number of people who have gone from school to startup success in 10 years is pretty large.
A typical trajectory seems to be move here working for some current 'big' tech company. Build a network of the cool people there and figure out where you eventually want to live, then show your stuff at BigCorp while people who have been there longer start peeling off. Most people know who are the 'good' people and who are the not so good people at their previous employment, if they have you in the 'good' category and they've gone off to do a startup you find interesting, you can often follow them there. Then get your feet wet in a startup early employee to exit (death, buyout, what haveyou). During that time you get known by the VCs in the company and your peers there, perhaps you recruit people. You prove you can be effective in a small environment. Then using your connections with investors or other people you've met you go in as a really early group of already more seasoned people, which ideally has a solid outcome, and at that point 10 - 12 years have your graduation from school you are ready to start your own thing. The graphs in this chart [1] match my experience. People doing a lot of the founding are in their 30's.
Up until you're the founder though, success or failure is rarely on you, its on the founders. And even then depending on how it failed well that can actually be a positive if it was shooting for the stars and only making it to the outskirts of the solar system.
[+] [-] mbesto|12 years ago|reply
Here's my 2c. The average person in SV is on their 4-5th startup (whether started or early employee), as compared to the 1st-3rd elsewhere (YMMV). Think of it this way - instead of BigCo wasting away money on a new product launch (good example - Microsoft Kin), there's loads of money being poured into 100's of Kin-like products, and only very few emerge victorious. This is only possible because of the massive amount of recycled money in tech startups.
The rationalization of failure in SV has less to do with commercial progress and more about sociological factors. In other words, there is a huge support network of people who have experienced failures, so it eases the pain of it happening to you. Think about going to an AA meeting where there are 100 recovering alcoholics vs one that has 5. The one with the 100 makes it much easier to recover. You get a large pool of like-minded people and can create allegiances/relationships with much more variety. Want to find someone who also failed a Fitness Tech wearable company in Chicago? Good luck. In SV? There's probably one living down the street from you.
Lastly, there is a fair share of fakers here. Number wise, more than anywhere else, but relative to the successes, it's no different than anywhere else. People can hustle their way into the industry with little effort. People rarely check backgrounds here, and there is a winner take all attitude (integrated with a passive, pay-it-forward mentality).
> What is worse is that breaking into the funding market is rather difficult unless you have a success story under your belt.
This is slightly a myth. One thing that is preached here and does bode well, is that traction matters. If you can build something (that people want), get traction (prove they want it), then there is more than enough money floating around to get funding. Is it easier to get funding once you've proven yourself in the Valley? Absolutely. But you'd be surprised to find that funding isn't everything here.
[+] [-] EC1|12 years ago|reply
The possibility of failure based extraneous conditions already makes failure OK.
My internet marketing business failed because Google changed their SEO guidelines and it shut me down. I did everything perfectly, or so I thought, and then it just happened. That's alright.
I think failure should be taken in context. Recently in a big project at a bank (absolute disaster of a project, most of us quit), I am seen as a failure because I do not spend my time after hours (unpaid) working, while the rest of my team does. Is this in my control? Yeah sure it is, but at the same time it isn't.
> On the flip side, if you failed - that failure acts as a noose going forward.
A personal fail is a form of personal victory, seen as failure by everyone else who isn't you.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] determinant|12 years ago|reply
(This is a serious question.)
[+] [-] MechanicalTwerk|12 years ago|reply
I don't quite know what to make of it. I can hear my Organizational Behavior professor from college yelling "Group think! Group think!" or some bs like that but I was never a huge fan of that stuff. It certainly doesn't stand out as much as people who have picked up Zuck's habits. Ever hear anyone begin the answer to any question (literally does not matter what the question is or how it is posed) with "Right, so...". You can be sure their youtube history is riddled with Zuck interviews.
I know it's not isolated to tech and every industry faces this phenomenon. It just makes me cringe and I wish it wasn't so prevalent.
[+] [-] larrys|12 years ago|reply
Paul has a great deal of repect for Sam and Sam for Paul.
Not to mention that people are probably going to be more likely to support people that are like them in one way or another. I know when I get a phone call I tend to like people who talk fast, don't mess around with niceties (to me "how are you doing" is a complete waste of time) and get right to the point. Others of course don't. [1]
That said I don't know if your point is correct or not but it wouldn't surprise me if it was.
Starting a sentence with "so" is a crutch that I started to notice people using several years ago. That's clearly something that they pick up when surrounded in a community of others doing the same.
[1] A bit of selling is always like modem negotiation. Usually it's a good idea to parrot the behavior of the person you are trying to sell to. If they talk slow you talk slow. If they talk fast you talk fast. In general of course always exceptions.
[+] [-] zmitri|12 years ago|reply
From the short conversations and limited interactions I've had with each of them plus Sam's actions since becoming president (eg http://blog.samaltman.com/what-ive-learned-from-female-found... and his recent RFS for breakthrough technologies) it seems to me that their leadership styles are very, very different.
[+] [-] staunch|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timtamboy63|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keithwarren|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emiliobumachar|12 years ago|reply
pg says that a lot: http://paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html
"I now have enough experience with startups to be able to say what the most important quality is in a startup founder, and it's not what you might think. The most important quality in a startup founder is determination. Not intelligence-- determination"
[+] [-] w1ntermute|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MatthiasP|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theorique|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] determinant|12 years ago|reply
When you're sitting around in a room at 3AM in the morning in front of the glow of a monitor slaving away on code with no paycheck in sight, random inspirational tidbits on the internet make a difference -- particularly from people on the side of success. Even with funding, sometimes those 3AM silent moments can be scary.
[+] [-] happy_pen|12 years ago|reply
I like the thought behind it, but it seems a liiiitle bit ingenuous to say it like that because success usually constitutes being acquired later on by the supposed "big company" and VC's making a lot of money.
[+] [-] chadwickthebold|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sama|12 years ago|reply
most great founders want to both do something great and to make a lot of money.
[+] [-] wdewind|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abtinf|12 years ago|reply
My first thought was that you meant disingenuous. And that makes sense in the context of your sentence.
But then I checked if ingenuous is even a word... and it is: "showing innocent or childlike simplicity and candidness" or " lacking craft or subtlety". And those sort of work in the context of the sentence too.
So either it was a typo, a misunderstanding of english word formation, a brain fart, or an intentional use of an uncommon word by someone far more articulate than I.
[+] [-] johnrob|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dude_abides|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adamzerner|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wtmcc|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] 7Figures2Commas|12 years ago|reply
Silicon Valley's engineer fetish is inane. Most early-stage web startups simply need CRUD applications that work at limited scale. Commodity-level web developers can build these applications.
What is not a commodity, in order of importance:
1. Domain expertise.
2. Product development/management.
3. User experience.
I'm sure lots of people would disagree, but you can test this. Go out and try to find the following:
1. Somebody who has worked in an industry for more than 5 years, knows it inside and out, and has relationships that can be leveraged for sales and business development.
2. An experienced product manager.
3. A proven UI/UX person capable of designing quality experiences around moderately complex workflows.
4. A PHP or Rails developer who can build a working application if given a reasonable spec and design assets.
#4 is not your problem. Most of the time, this person will be the easiest to locate and cheapest to acquire.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]